Kelly Reichardt’s “The Mastermind” offers an art-heist with a soul, timed for our moment

22 October 2025

Skulking deadbeat dad ... Josh O’Connor scopes a gallery in The Mastermind. Photograph: MUBI/PA

When Kelly Reichardt set out to make her newest film, The Mastermind, she reached not for the slick, high-speed thrills of caper cinema but for something quieter, more probing, and strangely timely premiering in the same week that headlines exposed yet another major museum theft.

Set in 1970s Massachusetts and starring Josh O’Connor as JB Mooney, a disenchanted suburban father who decides he’ll steal four paintings from a local gallery, the film flips the usual crime-movie formula on its head. The theft itself happens early on; what follows is not a cat-and-mouse thriller but a portrait of unraveling. Viewers encounter Mooney hauling bulky crates, nervously hiding the canvases in a hayloft. Reichardt deliberately lingers on domestic routine, guilt, tedium and the weight of a crime poorly thought through.

Reichardt has long been admired for her patient, character-led films. Here she retains that signature tone but with a twist: The Mastermind is in conversation with spectacle, authority and the moment. The robbery resonates with wider cultural anxieties about value what’s taken, what’s lost, and what remains. The pull of the museum vault connects to current debates about cultural property, institutional vulnerability and the spectatorship of crime.

Mooney’s ambition is banal: to escape stagnation, to assert himself. But his means are flawed and immature. Unlike the suave thieves of genre conventions, this man enters crime for reasons that feel both absurd and intimately human. The result is not a twist or heist reveal but a slow dissolve of identity, authority and illusion. Reichardt said she isn’t making the film about the heist per se but about what happens after.

O’Connor brings nuance to Mooney: part self-pitying father, part embarrassed criminal, part fragmenting symbol of 1970s American malaise. He carries the physicality of the plan climbing ladders, moving boxes but the emotional fallout is internal, unspectacular and deeply messy. This is not about getting away clean; it’s about not knowing how to carry the weight of what you have taken.

Structure-wise, the film turns genre expectations inside out. The theft occupies the first half hour; thereafter the score shrinks, the visuals flatten. Time elongates. A scene that might take minutes elsewhere becomes a nervous ritual here: Mooney placing canvases into boxes, labelling them, shuffling them. The camera watches, the soundtrack retreats. It is an act of resistance against spectacle.

For audiences steeped in fast pacing and clever reveals the effect may feel unconventional but that is exactly the point. Reichardt invites the viewer to sit with failure, to feel the drag of consequence. The glamour of theft gives way to the disturbance of expectation. By shifting focus from plot to process she refocuses on the ordinary, on interior lives, on the fracture of purpose.

The political resonance is unmistakable. Though the film keeps its temporal setting in 1970, a year of domestic unrest, student protests and national guard deployments, it echoes today’s questions about institutional power and the value of things, decorative or otherwise. “Turning your federal military against your citizens,” Reichardt remarked, “that’s cool in 2025.” The film’s timing with museum heists and cultural theft in the news makes it feel almost prophetic.

Visually the film carries Reichardt’s signature minimalism: natural light, lingering takes, unhurried compositions. Chris Blauvelt’s cinematography skews muted but precise; the robbery isn’t shown in slick montage but low-key texture. The domestic scenes feel lived-in. The museum set, though authentic, becomes backdrop to interior crisis. The art isn’t romanticised it’s heavy, awkward, an asset with consequences.

Reichardt’s career trajectory makes this film all the more interesting. After years of making smaller, quieter works, The Mastermind is her largest budget, her most ambitious frame but paradoxically, she uses that space to scale down the drama. Her working-class father and mother were law-enforcement professionals, and she grew up with crime-scene glimpses; she now channels that into a film that trades car chases for the cluttered aftermath of criminal decisions.

In the larger landscape of 2025 film-making the movie offers a corrective. While many heist films go for spectacle or moral clarity, this one offers muted ambiguity, moral drift and the feeling of being behind the curtain. It asks: what happens when you steal something big and nothing changes outwardly, but everything inside does?

For viewers expecting caper-thrills the answer may take time to settle but that’s the invitation. The film does not resolve neatly. Mooney does not become an anti-hero or face ultimate redemption. He simply keeps moving and the world keeps on. Reichardt leaves the audience with the mess.

In a year when museums, culture-property theft and institutional trust are questions in the news, The Mastermind enters the conversation not as spectacle but as reflection. It reminds us that every heist has a longer tail, that value is not only monetary, and that the glazed frames of stolen art may cast deeper shadows than the vault they came from.